The Yes Men are an activist group known for satirical interventions at business events, in the streets, and in the media.

Armed with nothing but fake websites and thrift store suits, Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno impersonate corporate evildoers in order to draw attention to their crimes against humanity and the environment.

Their hit list includes some of the biggest climate criminals, targeting planet – plundering entities such as Shell Oil, Gazprom, and the US Chamber of Commerce.

They knocked billions of dollars off Dow Chemical’s stock value while exposing the environmental disaster in Bhopal. They tackled the beef industry’s massive role in the California drought by asking consumers to skip showers for each burger consumed.

They called the NRA on its racist agenda by launching “Share the Safety”: a fake “buy one, give one” program to get guns into the hands of those actually threatened by the police and other government agents.

In the ethical hacking world they are known as masters of “social engineering” and have keynoted the HOPE (Hackers on Planet Earth) conference in New York and Re:Publica in Berlin. At Northern Europe’s largest music festival, The Yes Men collaborated with digital rights activist Edward Snowden to pull off a prank that exposed the collusion of various European governments in US surveillance programs.

Their irreverent tactics have a proven track record of hijacking the public dialogue worldwide about the issues of the day, such as free trade, global capitalism, and global warming.

They’ve discovered that tackling huge issues with humor and fearlessness is a powerful tool for change. And now they want everyone to get involved in the fight.

Chris Paine is a filmmaker who tours worldwide as an advocate for electric vehicles and sustainable transportation. He’s best known for his 2011 film Revenge of the Electric Car (about the formation of Tesla Motors) and the film Who Killed the Electric Car? which has been making waves since its launch at the 2006 Sundance festival. Recent projects include producing work on the 2015 documentary Bikes vs. Cars as well as films including Charge (electric motorcycles) and No Maps for These Territories (with futurist William Gibson).

Other notable projects include “Marrakesh House” in Los Angeles, a 21st century ecological retrofit of an 1950s building into an sustainable-event space and home. Amid gardens and art made from upcycled materials, solar power runs the house and powers the electric cars and electric bikes.

Chris serves on the board of environmental group Friends of the Earth in Washington DC and the Clean Air Coalition in Los Angeles. Activist projects include the award winning online site counterspill.org in the wake of the 2010 BP disaster. He’s appeared on “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” and many syndicated news programs.

Featured lectures:

Getting Around 2.0: Folding Bikes and Plug-In Vehicles: Amidst the pressure of high gas prices, election panic, and economic turmoil, comes good news. Light rail, bike lanes, solar power and plug-in vehicles are arriving to make a cleaner, more liberating reality possible for those who embrace them. Chris Paine, award winning documentary filmmaker behind Revenge of the Electric Car, Who Killed the Electric Car, and now advisor to the Conscious Commuter Corporation shares stories from the front lines.

How many light bulbs does it take to plug in an electric car?: Chris’s talk glides through the politics, personalities, and cold hard cash reasons for return of the electric car. Chris shares his role as the filmmaker who caught GM and others destroying thousands of this “disruptive technology” in 2003. Seven years later, he documented the incredible return of electric cars for his 2011 documentary Revenge of the Electric Car. This presentation recaps the challenges and then charts the A to Z reasons for their comeback.

How to win friends and influence people with arrests, documentaries, and the art of rhetoric: Chris shares his journey from college activist in Nevada and California to documentary filmmaker with Who Killed the Electric Car?. What basic arts of persuasion seem to work in whatever medium they are deployed? Along with a good dose of improvisation, Chris dusts off Aristotle’s famed tools of rhetoric: pathos, ethos, and logos to help make stories talk whether on the streets or in the theater.

]]>5345The Greening of Southiehttp://eviltwinbooking.org/films/the-greening-of-southie/
Mon, 10 Dec 2012 23:31:40 +0000http://etbagency.org/?post_type=films&p=5449A feature documentary about the men and women who set out to create Boston’s first residential green building… and more or less succeed.

The Greening of Southie opens at orientation for the Macallen Building construction crew, where seasoned workers gather to hear about the “green building” they are being asked to build. Boston’s union plumbers, carpenters and tile-workers want to know, “What’s the point?”

The Macallen development team is seeking a “LEED Gold” rating for their new building, an objective achieved by collecting points for various green technologies. The first points––local concrete and recycled steel––introduce us to Bob Gottlich, an ironworker who, to his surprise, enjoys the idea of working on a “recycled building.” Others are more skeptical, like Wayne Phillips, a Trinidadian laborer who shakes his head at the word “environment,” and Carrie Mowbray, a waste hauler who admits she “used to think of green as being dorky.”

The architects introduce us to the neighborhood––a notoriously insular community with a reputation for Irish mobs and a resistance to change. Change, however, is exactly what 33-year-old developer Tim Pappas has in mind. He hires the youngest consultants he can find. Macallen, as project manager Jason Burrell points out, will be the building that makes or breaks his team.

As the film unfolds and the building goes up, the story traces the building’s odd materials––wheat-board cabinets and selectively harvested wood––back to their sources on Midwestern farms or in Bolivian rainforests. Points keep accruing at the building site, as soil and succulents are hoisted onto the green roof, and fast-growing bamboo is installed on the floor.

Macallen, despite its location in working-class Southie, will be a luxury building, with condominiums running beyond $2 million. But Wayne, the skeptical laborer, has come to wish he “could live in the environmental building that we built.” Like most locals, he’s priced out, and the inaccessibility of green design gets a poignant critique.

Suddenly, things start to go wrong. The wheat-board cabinets swell, making installation of countertops impossible. The green roof plants die off, and need to be replanted. And the bamboo floors are buckling, separating from the concrete base and cupping visibly. The crew tears out 75 bamboo floors and re-orders from China.

Amidst concerns that the bamboo debacle is sending sawdust into the green ventilation system, the team’s quest for a “Gold” rating seems precarious. Owner Tim Pappas wonders whether all the energy consumed in bringing new wood from China was worth its global warming cost. A chorus of criticism emerges; the building’s once-touted materials may actually have increased the overall energy footprint of the project.

Redemption comes in the form of Wayne’s daughter Ashakie, who has asked her father for a tour of the building. As she marvels at all that has gone right with Macallen, new condo owner Bill Gleason loads his boxes into his unit, and reports on the building’s conservation strategies start to pour in. As the sun glints off the façade, Southie resident Joe Doherty considers the completed building from his stoop, shrugs, and sums up what most of the building crew seems to think: “we’ll see.”

Praise for The Greening Of Southie:

“A clear-eyed film… an examination of the hard work involved in going green.” – The Bostonist

“A balanced but incisive look at a complex issue that affects us all.” – Seattle Times

“Slick and well-presented.” – Seattle Weekly

“Makes the construction site look like a beautiful and mysterious place.” – Portland Tribune

]]>5449The Corporationhttp://eviltwinbooking.org/films/the-corporation/
Mon, 10 Dec 2012 23:26:13 +0000http://etbagency.org/?post_type=films&p=5436A darkly amusing account of the institution’s evolution as a legal “person,” The Corporation is a powerful indictment of the roots of corporate power.

A darkly amusing account of the institution’s evolution as a legal “person,” The Corporation is a powerful indictment of the roots of corporate power. So, what kind of person is it? The filmmakers conclude that a person whose prime directive is to produce ever-increasing profit for its shareholders – regardless of the cost to people or the planet – fits the diagnostic criteria of a psychopath.

One hundred and fifty years ago, the corporation was a relatively insignificant entity. Today, it is a vivid, dramatic and pervasive presence in all our lives. Like the Church, the Monarchy, and the Communist Party in other times and places, the corporation is today’s dominant institution. But history humbles dominant institutions. All have been crushed, belittled or absorbed into some new order. The corporation is unlikely to be the first to defy history. In this complex and highly entertaining documentary, Mark Achbar, co-director of the influential and inventive Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media, teams up with co-director Jennifer Abbott and writer Joel Bakan to examine the far-reaching repercussions of the corporation’s increasing preeminence. Featuring interviews with CEO’s and top-level executives from some of the world’s largest corporations and critical thinkers: Noam Chomsky, Peter Drucker, Milton Friedman, Naomi Klein, Vandana Shiva, Steve Wilson, Jane Akre, and muckraking filmmaker Michael Moore.

Winner of the Audience Award for Documentary in World Cinema at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival and numerous other awards including 7 audience choice awards. Based on the book: “The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power” by Joel Bakan.

Praise for The Corporation:

“The Corporation, from Mark Achbar (co-director of Manufacturing Consent), Jennifer Abbott, and Joel Bakan, examines the nature and history of corporations and includes specific examples of corporate deception, including media bias. Through interviews with 42 people, among them company CEOs, thinkers, activists, and whistleblowers, including Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, Michael Moore, and executives from Pfizer, Goodyear, and Royal Dutch Shell, The Corporation asks some pointed questions that offer a generally unflattering portrait of increasingly global businesses.” — Eugene Hernandez, indieWIRE

“Advance press billed The Corporation as ‘the next Bowling for Columbine,’ but don’t be misled: The Corporation is smarter. Riffing on complicated economic structures with more than a modicum of wit, Canadian filmmakers Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott, along with screenwriter Joel Bakan, have hit upon a very clever device. They take a textbook definition of psychopath… and proceed to show how perfectly corporations fit the diagnosis. Hilarious and chilling, The Corporation wrangles international finance to the ground and shows how documentary at its best can let us know more than personality journalism ever can… The Corporation is brilliant at demonstrating how we’ve been hoodwinked.” — B. Ruby Rich,San Francisco Bay Guardian

]]>5436The Yes Labhttp://eviltwinbooking.org/presentations/the-yes-lab/
Mon, 10 Dec 2012 23:06:23 +0000http://etbagency.org/?post_type=presentations&p=5388The Yes Lab is a series of workshops and trainings with the Yes Men to help activist groups carry out media-getting creative actions on their own.

By impersonating big corporations and corrupt leaders who put profits ahead of everything else, the Yes Men expose their abuses of the environment and human rights and draw media attention to crucial issues.

Over the last few years, The Yes Men have given away all their secrets to activists, sharing what they have learned from their last decade or so of doing “identity correction”.

The result is The Yes Lab, a workshop to help activist groups carry out media-getting creative actions on their own.

In collaboration with Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno of The Yes Men, participants will brainstorm fun, funny, and enjoyably risky ways to publicize issues of import to them and their communities… and, hopefully, millions of others. Why so much emphasis on fun and funny? Because over the years, the Yes Men discovered that important issues can be delivered to mainstream audiences by adding large dollops of laughter. Their low-budget, work-intensive actions have drawn regular coverage from the major outlets (the New York Times, CNN, Reuters, AP, AFP, BBC, NPR and more) highlighting normally under-reported issues, such as the Bhopal chemical plant disaster, the terrible climate position of the Chamber of Commerce, and the shuttering of available low-income housing in post-Katrina New Orleans, to name just a few.

]]>5388Who Killed The Electric Car?http://eviltwinbooking.org/films/who-killed-the-electric-car/
Mon, 10 Dec 2012 23:04:09 +0000http://etbagency.org/?post_type=films&p=5385Documentary film which chronicles the life and mysterious death of the EV1, examining its cultural and economic ripple effects.

It was among the fastest, most efficient production cars ever built. It ran on electricity, produced no emissions and catapulted American technology to the forefront of the automotive industry. The lucky few who drove it never wanted to give it up. So why did General Motors crush its fleet of EV1 electric vehicles in the Arizona desert?

Who Killed The Electric Car? chronicles the life and mysterious death of the GM EV1, examining its cultural and economic ripple effects and how they reverberated through the halls of government and big business.

The electric car threatened the status quo. The truth behind its demise resembles the climactic outcome of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express: multiple suspects, each taking their turn with the knife. Who Killed The Electric Car? interviews and investigates automakers, legislators, engineers, consumers and car enthusiasts from Los Angeles to Detroit, to work through motives and alibis, and to piece the complex puzzle together.

Who Killed The Electric Car? is not just about the EV1. It’s about how this allegory for failure—reflected in today’s oil prices and air quality—can also be a shining symbol of society’s potential to better itself and the world around it. While there’s plenty of outrage for lost time, there’s also time for renewal as technology is reborn in Who Killed The Electric Car?

Praise for Who Killed the Electric Car?:

“A murder mystery, a call to arms and an effective inducement to rage, Who Killed the Electric Car? is the latest and one of the more successful additions to the growing ranks of issue-oriented documentaries.” – The New York Times

]]>Jennifer Abbott is a multi-award winning director and editor of documentaries with a particular interest in social justice and deep ecology issues. She is one of the directors and the editor of The Corporation, the top grossing Canadian documentary in history, which to date has won 25 international awards including the Audience Award for World Cinema at the Sundance film festival. She has also produced, directed, and editedA Cow at My Table, a feature documentary about meat, culture, and animals, which won 8 international awards. Other past works include the experimental short and video installation about interracial relationships Skinned, which toured North America and Europe including New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

Abbott has edited numerous documentaries, installations, and performance works. She is the editor and a contributing writer for the book Making Video “In”: The Contested Ground of Alternative Video on the West Coast. As an organic gardener and mother, she shares her home on an island off Canada’s West Coast with, among others, a blind dog and two rescued pigs.

Greg Palast is the investigative journalist and author who broke the story of how Jeb Bush purged thousands of Black Florida citizens from voter rolls before the 2000 election, thereby handing the White House to his brother George W. Bush.

His reports on the theft of the 2000 and 2004 US elections, the spike of the FBI investigations of the bin Ladens before September 11, the secret State Department documents planning the seizure of Iraq’s oil fields have won him a record six Project Censored awards for reporting the news American media doesn’t want you to hear.

Palast turned his skills to journalism after two decades as a top investigator of corporate fraud. He directed the U.S. governmentʼs largest racketeering case in history– winning a $4.3 billion jury award. He also conducted the investigation of fraud charges in the Exxon Valdez grounding. Following the Deepwater Horizon explosion, Palast set off on a five-continent undercover investigation of BP and the oil industry for British televisionʼs top current affairs program, Dispatches.

He returned to America to report for Harper’s Magazine. Palast’s Sam Spade style television and print exposés about financial vultures, election manipulations, War on Terror and globalization, are seen on BBC’s Newsnight and Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now!

Palast, who has led investigations for governments on three continents also has an academic side: the author of ‘Democracy and Regulation, a seminal treatise on energy corporations and government control’ was commissioned by the United Nations based on his lectures at Cambridge University and the University of São Paulo.

Beginning in the 1970s, having earned his degree in finance at the University of Chicago studying under Milton Friedman and free-trade luminaries, Palast went on to challenge their vision of a New Global Order, working for the United Steelworkers of America, the Enron workers’ coalition in Latin America and consumer and environmental groups worldwide. In 1998 Palast went undercover for Britain’s Observer, worked his way inside the prime minister’s inner circle and busted open Tony Blair’s biggest scandal, “Lobbygate,” chosen by Palast’s press colleagues in the UK as “Story of the Year.” As the Chicago Tribune said, Palast became a “fanatic about documents–especially those marked “secret and confidential” from the locked file cabinets of the FBI, the World Bank, the US State Department and other closed-door operations of government and industry–which regularly find their way into his hands. The inside information he obtained on Rev. Pat Robertson won him a nomination as Britain’s top business journalist. “An American hero,” said Martin Luther King III. In the BBC documentary, Bush Family Fortunes, Palast exposed George Bush Jr.’s dodging the Vietnam War draft.

Awards:

• George Orwell Courage in Journalism Award (for BBC documentary, Bush Family Fortunes)
• Patron of the Philosophical Society, Trinity College (an award previously given to Oscar Wilde and Jonathan Swift)
• The Financial Times David Thomas Prize
• Nominated for Business Journalist of the Year 1998 (UK)
• Politics Story of the Year on Salon.com 2001
• The Upton Sinclair Freedom of Expression Award from The American Civil Liberties Union
• George Orwell Courage in Journalism Award: Freedom Cinema Fest at The Sundance Film Festival
• Guerilla News Network’s Reporter of the Year
• The Peace and Justice Award -Office of the Americas
• Path Breaking Investigative Journalism Award–Long Island Progressive Coalition
• National Press Club’s Arthur Rowse Award for Press Criticism, Book Category, First Place.
Quotes:

“Palast upsets all the right people” -Noam Chomsky

“Palast’s stories bite. They’re so relevant they threaten to alter history. Palast is exactly what a journalist is supposed to be – a truth hound, doggedly independent, undaunted by power.” -Chicago Tribune

“The top investigative journalist in the United States is persona non grata in his own country’s media.” -Asia Times
Books:

]]>Actor Ed Begley Jr. is both vegan and an environmental activist. He’s known for turning up at Hollywood events on his bicycle. He uses press coverage to bring attention to environmental issues including energy efficiency and climate change.

His presentation, Live Simply So That Others Can Simply Live incorporates an empowering and humorous message on sustainable living, which includes stories from the electric car he drove in 1970 to helpful hints on picking the ‘low hanging fruit’ of energy savings.

Ed Begley, Jr. has served as chairman of the Environmental Media Association and the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy. He serves on the boards of many organizations, including the Thoreau Institute and the Midnight Mission. His work has earned awards from numerous environmental groups including the California League of Conservation Voters, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Coalition for Clean Air, Heal the Bay, the Santa Monica Baykeeper and the Cesar E. Chavez Foundation.

He co-starred for three seasons in the hit Planet Green television series Living with Ed, a look at the day-to-day realities of “living green” with his wife Rachelle Carson, who’s not quite as enthusiastic about a rain barrel as he. He is the author of Living Like Ed (2008), and, Ed Begley’s Guide to Sustainable Living (2009).

Begley lives in Studio City, CA in a small, energy efficient home with his wife and co-star Rachelle Carson and their daughter Hayden. He is currently constructing a new LEED Platinum home that will be a showcase of energy efficiency and sustainable living.

++ Film, television and theater work ++

Begley first came to audiences’ attention for his portrayal of Dr. Victor Ehrlich on the long-running hit television series St. Elsewhere, for which he received six Emmy nominations. Since then, he has appeared in several Christopher Guest films, including A Mighty Wind, Best In Show and For Your Consideration, and also appeared in include Woody Allen’s Whatever Works with Larry David, as well as Pineapple Express, Batman Forever, The Accidental Tourist and The Inlaws. In 2012, Begley completed work on a new HBO feature film about the life of boxer Muhammad Ali.

On television, Begley has had recurring roles on Six Feet Under and Arrested Development, and guest starred on The West Wing, The Practice, and Boston Legal, and had a role in the CBS series CSI Miami. His forthcoming projects include Arrested Development, several comedies for Funny or Die, and a new HBO/BBC comedy miniseries directed by Christopher Guest. Begley has also directed several episodes of the hit TV series NYPD Blue.

Begley also starred in the West Coast premiere of David Mamet’s Cryptogram at the Geffen Playhouse, and starred in Mamet’s production of Romance at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, and in Mamet’s play November in Los Angeles.